Laboratories wherein dangerous experiments or processes are performed require protection for the workers and the experiments in the laboratory. One very common protection found in laboratories are fume hoods in which chemical reactions are conducted. The fume hoods have air drawn out of them thus essentially preventing any toxic fumes from escaping the fume hood into the laboratory and threatening the operators. The velocity of air drawn through the fume hood sash is controlled to a value high enough to maintain safety for the operator and low enough to provide non-turbulent air for the experiment of process.
An additional protection that can be provided is to maintain the static pressure in the laboratory at a lower or higher pressure than the pressure in the surrounding corridors of the building. A lower pressure would prevent contaminants from exiting the laboratory in the case of an accident.
A higher pressure would prevent contaminants from entering the laboratory, as is the case in a clean room. Also, control of the laboratory climate is required both for operator comfort and for certain experiments or processes where strict temperature and humidity control are necessary.
Moreover, in regard to the tuning of a processor, for instance, for fume hoods, there exists automatically tunable processors which respond to the system into which they are integrated. But after the processor is initially tuned to its system, to tune it in terms of how a user would like the processor to respond with respect to the system, the user must be fluent in operation of the operating system of the processor in order to retune it.
There are many schemes and apparatuses that provide such control and protection to laboratories. However, heretofore, there have been no systems that provide for integrated direct digital control of laboratories. Additionally, there have been no systems that are automatically tunable based on simple manual inputs to the system.
Furthermore, heretofore, fume hoods typically have utilized the sash position as an integral part of the determination for face velocity or flow. The present invention eliminates the need to know sash position to determine face velocity or flow.